Of the numerous interactive environments at Otherworld, the exhibit which caught my interest most was what I interpreted to be a mushroom garden. This occurs prior to entering the exhibit with the mechanical feeding room for the bull with pyramid shaped utters and groans at you when you enter the wrong feeding sequence. This room consists of an elegant three starred archway with three groupings of mushroom capped surfaces sitting above planters. All of these illuminated surfaces are animated by overhead projectors carefully placed, angled and programmed to giving the environment a feeling that it is alive and in motion. This is not unique as most of the exhibits at otherworld rely on projection mapping techniques; however, what stood out to me was its interactivity.

As demonstrated in the videos below, there are spinning colored discs mapped outside each mushroom cap, which when stepped on, cause a flood of color to spill outwards onto the floor. The structure reminds more of gas diffusion such as smoke, flames, or fog due to the speed of expansion, geometric structure and color. Although I could not tell precisely how the system worked, I imagine there was some element of camera or other sensing which could detect the area of color detected on those spinning disks. When your foot covers the disc, it triggers the color to flow – so I presume the system has a threshold at which it detects shadows present on the disc spot. Further, each flow pattern was unique meaning that no two times that you stepped on the disk would there be the same structure / flow observed. To me this means there must be some random variable detected from the environment which governs how the light will flow. I am familiar with these types of flow generation techniques such as this reaction-diffusion generator made by Karl Sims https://www.karlsims.com/rdtool.html based on mathematical models of physical phenomena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_system. While they probably don’t have as complex of a mathematical model as described above, it still serves to suggest that there is some math involved to compute how the light will flow across a surface based on some initial random variable.

As a study in natural interaction, I observed several people as they entered the room and played around. For most, they seemed impressed by the scenery and were engaged visually by the Moire like pattens visible on the mushrooms. I could tell this by how the setting drew in their attention. However, most people didn’t notice the interactive element as they didn’t step on the spinning light discs. There was one person who did realize the hidden interactivity and chose to step on all of the discs. I found it interesting that she chose to jump from one disc to the next as they were spaced within hopping distance. This reminded me of games I’d play with my sister as a child which we called the floor is lava and we would try to move through a room only stepping on furniture and not the carpeting. As a benevolent alteration to this interactive design, it’d be interesting to account for tracking of human movement from one disc to the next. Perhaps if the person can jump from one end of the room to the next while triggering each of the discs, that the room will acknowledge this accomplishment as is done in the next room when the right sequence is fed to the bull utters. This may be technically challenging given the short detection time allowed for a sensor when someone is hopping quickly through an environment. Secondly, there would be a challenge in synchronizing detection of events from multiple cameras; yet, I bet there is already a centralized media server acting as the master to its various child projectors and sensors.